Egyptian censor-busting site hacked

A Morocco-based website designed to give Egyptians the ability to get around their government’s jamming of Internet sites was brought down on Friday by a sophisticated cyber-attack, the website’s managing director said.

“Someone got into the site about four o’clock this morning and destroyed its means of access to the global web,” Francesco Landogna said.

The site, Wall5, had set up a ghost portal which circumvented the virtual barriers put up by Egyptian authorities since the start of the massive demonstrations against President Hosni Mubarak two weeks ago.

Landogna said that the number of downloads of Wall5’s censorship-busting program had exceeded 200,000 by late Thursday. Algerian as well as Egyptian subscribers have used it.

Rejecting a chance attack by hackers, he said, “These were people with sophisticated tools who got into the server and wrecked it.”

Landogna said it was impossible to tell where the attack had come from, but he thought it was outside Morocco.

Wall5 was set up three years ago as the first social network allowing Moroccan and other North African computer users to chat in a local dialect, Darija, and has some half-a-million subscribers, Landogna said.

Its servers are located in Italy and Canada.

By Jonathan Terry